The Inquirer is shutting down. After nearly two decades of witty technology news, the inq comes to an end. This is a pity. Many enjoyed the website for their refreshingly honest look at technology. In a time when far too many technology sites bent over backwards to get access to samples and early access, the inq felt different. Critical journalism, not just blogging. Armed with an utter lack of respect for anyone. Never condescending but often hilariously mocking. The inquirer was fun to read. The website will be missed. https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3084741/the-inquirer-reaches-end-of-life
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @05:04PM (7 children)
El Reg was great until Magee left and Orlowski labelled half the readership "linux crusties". The Inq was almost as notable as the Register at one point but I've not visited the site in many years. It may be missed by some but I'd pretty much forgotten about it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Pino P on Saturday December 21 2019, @05:08PM (3 children)
I remember The Inquirer mostly as one of the first sites I noticed to be using an anti-adblock script that confuses Firefox's built-in tracking protection with an ad blocker. Apparently websites' developers don't know how to fall back to ads that don't track users across multiple websites.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @09:29PM
No, I'm sure they still remember how to do it. It's just a question if they want to do it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sjames on Saturday December 21 2019, @09:51PM (1 child)
There's no confusion. It's just easier to cry about ad-blocking than it is to say "pretty please leave yourself exposed to every nasty our unchecked ad network wants to throw at you so we can dart and tag you like a wild bear.".
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday December 21 2019, @10:45PM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @05:08PM
El Reg is still good, and covers a wider range of news than other sites. Orlowski's punk ass is gone, but he was right about Google.
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Saturday December 21 2019, @05:26PM (1 child)
Yeah, it always felt a bit like the Register (maybe it was a layout thing) to me. Never really one of my primary sites, but one that I wound up on often enough due to its nature, my interests, and my preference for things a bit cynical and irreverent.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 4, Informative) by choose another one on Saturday December 21 2019, @06:23PM
Wasn't a layout thing - the INQ was founded after a bunch of people split from The Register. Sort of not quite like this site and some other place I can't quite remember.
At least I think I remember it being that way, it's a long time ago now - two decades, yikes. It's a good long run though.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by BsAtHome on Saturday December 21 2019, @05:08PM (1 child)
They had some really good journalism and I have enjoyed to read their articles and the comments/discussions. That is, until years ago, they started to redesign the web interface to "modern" designs and hid the comment section behind disqus' javascript and TOS hell. That is when I left. I felt sorry for the writers, but they did the readers a disservice.
So yes, they will be missed. Their corporate backing and interface choices not so. I hope the journalists will find themselves a good new home and can continue bringing news.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @07:27PM
I want out interface burns.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @05:46PM (6 children)
At least we're finding out in advance instead of after the fact, like so many other sites that abruptly shutdown without any notice.
Perhaps someone at archive.org can mirror the content before it's put to rest and lost forever.
At least we still have The Register (El Reg) which I would truly miss if something were to happen to it.
Those guys are seriously over the top with the headline puns.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @08:12PM (5 children)
"Perhaps someone at archive.org can mirror the content before it's put to rest and lost forever."
I wonder if intellectual property laws would make that more difficult ...
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday December 21 2019, @09:05PM (4 children)
TheInquirer probably added a robots.txt file to exclude being crawled or archived.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Saturday December 21 2019, @09:16PM
robots.txt files, like doorlocks, only keep honest people honest.
There is an ongoing evolutionary battle between people trying to prevent site scraping, and site scrapers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 22 2019, @02:42AM (2 children)
The Inquirer's robots.txt [theinquirer.net] doesn't exclude the Internet Archive. Even if they did, IA changed their policy to ignore it anyway because companies and parking services were abusing it.
I don't know where you got your numbers, but the front page alone has been archived 7,838 times [archive.org] from April 5th, 2001 until December 19th, 2019. In addition, a total of 709,929 captures of 324,661 URLs of which 195,082 are unique after redirects. And that is just the text/html [archive.org] content. You can look at all the URLs by MIME type or look at their Site Map from that last link.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday December 22 2019, @03:04AM (1 child)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 22 2019, @03:51AM
Oh, yeah. I get the same thing when I try from their homepage. Seems an odd choice to suggest that, but I keep those URLs handy with the domain name blank, because IA doesn't exactly have a very good webpage to access their advanced features if you don't know they are there. But whenever you look at a website there in the future, it is usually helpful to use the other tabs to search all pages from one interface. You can also put globs in various places in the URL to make more specific searches.
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Saturday December 21 2019, @08:50PM
This is a proof the real purpose of the site was tracking, not spreading information to public.
We need better internets than that.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.